Reading Practice Intensive - Day 9

 

Day 9 - Sharing Reading

We began today's session looking at our Homework tasks and as always, it was good to see other's ideas and what tasks they had created.  You learn so much, and can "Stalk and Steal" (my new catch phrase!)

Naomi explained that today's session was not only about Sharing in Reading but also about tying it all together and looking at the big picture now that we were at the end.  

Fiona Grant was with us today as Dorothy is away having a well deserved break.  Fiona talked about in the early days of Manaiakalani they wanted a way for learners to have an audience through which to build a sense of self worth.  That authentic audience could be - Peer-to-peer, Class, School, Whānau, Local community, and The world.  I liked the idea Fiona shared about doing blog posts about book recommendations and having a holiday challenge to get both reading happening and blogging happening over the 2 week holiday break.  

Fiona also talked about how blogging does not need to be the student's finished work - students can 'share to learn' and 'share to finish learning.'

Class sites and class blogs are the primary online space for learners to access their learning, teachers share their reading programme designs with other teachers. This is how programme routines and innovations can be made  are visible to other teachers. All teachers have our favourite teachers that we “stalk” and "steal" from regularly! 

We recapped the Manaiakalani Pillars of Reading Practice. There are five core pillars. On Days 1-3 of the RPI we focussed on pillars 1 and 2: Planning for Ambitious Outcomes and Planning to Use Diverse Texts. We continued to focus on the second Pillar, but with a more detailed examination of Guided Reading. Regular and systematic Guided Reading offers particular benefits for teaching, observing and scaffolding learners to develop skills and strategies to better comprehend text with teacher support. 

The Manaiakalani Reading Model pivots on Teaching Learners to think and question. What Teachers do - Plan for ambitious outcomes, Plan to use diverse texts, Teach learners to think and question. What Learners do -  Think and question, Design rich creative experiences, Enable opportunities to share.  The use of the word question is a deliberate reference to criticality and to the skills of a critical thinker.   Today we looked at how we might ‘share’ this thinking and questioning.

Students “participate enthusiastically in reading communities, reading and discussing different kinds of texts…” (Te Mataiaho)  Communities are commonly defined by their shared interests, values, contexts, and participation.  Therefore classroom reading communities foster shared contributions of akonga, kaiako, whanau, & a wider online community, in valued reading practices.

Sharing builds reading communities.  For learners to participate enthusiastically in reading communities, in and beyond the classroom, sharing and shared practices need to be established, maintained and refined. In the context of 1:1 classrooms these fundamentally include: visibility, feedback & reflection, collaboration, and whānau engagement.

We need to plan to share or it won't happen. What will they share? When will they share? And how will they share?

(McGurk, 2014)

What did I learn that could improve my capability and confidence in teaching reading? 

Thinking ahead to next term or even next year - what do we want our students to blog? What are our 'big ticket items' - Response to text, Vocab follow up tasks, or Reading for enjoyment challenges? Over a fortnight how many posts do we want blogged? Do we break this down to subject areas, and have a minimum number of posts for Writing, Reading and Maths? We also need to teach our students how to 'tag' their blog posts with labels.

How can we get our Year 3s up-skilled on these things before the start of next year?

We covered Feedback today. there are some good resources for teachers on this website. 

Feedback is information provided (by the teacher, a peer, a book or computer programme, or an experience) about aspects of a student’s performance or the knowledge they have built up from a learning experience. It is important to note that the research demonstrates that it is not the quantity of feedback that makes a difference but the quality of the feedback, and the ways in which students are supported to engage with, respond to and utilise the feedback to improve. (Absolum, M - Clarity in the Classroom). Learners should use feedback to confirm, fine tune or restructure existing knowledge, beliefs and strategies.

Feedback Types:

• Evaluative (summative) - involves making a judgement (e.g. “That’s right!”; score; level)
• Descriptive (formative) - gives specific information of where learners are at and describes gaps
• Generative (formative) - feedforward or guidance for improvement

Feedback Givers:

• Teacher
• Peer-to-peer
• Whānau/aiga

Feedback Modes:

• Oral - (e.g. Guided Reading; Shared Reading)
• Written - (e.g. independent response activities; blogs)
• Multimodal - (e.g. Motes; audio; screencast)

What did I learn that could be used with my learners? 

I need to ensure that we use rubrics and success criteria more frequently - it makes visible what learners will be able to do to achieve the learning objectives.  Success criteria describe how students will go about achieving a learning intention or how they will know when they have learnt it. The teacher's criteria for making judgments about work, or understanding so learners can gauge achievement or quality of the outcome.  Co-construction with learners to promote ownership of the learning, by being self-evaluative as they are working, or when assessing completion or outcome. This can focus on the - Process, Product or the Disposition.

We recapped our session using Mahi Trackers or Hand-it-in Sheets.  This is something I tried, unsuccessfully, in Term 2 as an A3 paper table.  I would like to try to use it again now that the students are a bit older and in good routines. We talked about and shared what different teachers also used to track their commenting on blogs and student work.  Hapara can be used to check easily which students are blogging frequently (or not) and commenting.

Below: Almarode, J., Hattie, J., Fisher, D., & Frey, N. (2021). Rebounding and reinvesting. Where the evidence points for accelerating learning. A GOLD paper. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin. Retrieved from https://us.corwin.com/ en-us/nam/white-paper-reinvesting-and-rebounding

Learners need sharing opportunities to read and respond to texts in collaborative ways that include:

• Listening, reading and responding to each other’s reading (e.g. paired /buddy reading; recording)
• Discussing and co-creating responses to texts 
• Blog commenting
• Peer to peer feedback
• Sharing the texts they’ve enjoyed

I have recently begun to offer more opportunities for students to collaborate during 'Create' tasks - this is one of the areas of weakness picked up in our school Reading Observations in Term 2.  Today we discussed it could be as simple as just saying "collaborate with a buddy to..." or "have a discussion with a buddy about..."

What did I learn that could be shared within my wider community, with either colleagues, or whānau/aiga? 

I really enjoyed the segment today on 'Sharing with Whānau' as I feel that this is something that needs an overhaul.  We, like many schools, struggle to get whānau to engage with learner's blogs and leave comments. They may well view them and the learning but without the evidence of a comment we are not to know this.  I feel this puts more pressure on classroom teachers to comment on learner blogs to make the purpose of blogging worthwhile.  I know our junior classes who have hub blogs have the same thoughts on this - why do we spend so much time adding to the blogs each week if no one comments.

I liked the activity we did for getting whānau involved - we need to make deliberate opportunities to invite or include whānau.  We do some schoolwide things that have/are successful - cultural buddy reading, a parent category for our Book Week design a book cover competition with Pak'n'Save vouchers as prizes - but we need to be looking for opportunities to do more.  I loved the idea of whānau taking photos of their child reading to a pet or a soft toy, and the students bringing this back to school.

Bringing it all together: Layering opportunities to share across the reading programme:

• Diverse texts and practices - guided/shared/independent/buddy reading, text sets, cross-curricula links, windows/mirrors/sliding doors, reader profile survey 
• Vocabulary - pre-reading, during reading, after reading
• Thinking - literal/interpretive/evaluative, figurative/creative, reflective

Next big challenge - sustainability! Putting all of this new Reading Practice Intensive knowledge into place and continuing to do so.  Sarah and I will be presenting to a staff meeting next term to share the "gems" that we haven't already shared with our own teams.  Hopefully another two colleagues get the opportunity to do this programme in 2025.

Thanks to Naomi, Georgie and Anna - it's been fantastic!